Where Doves, in flocks, the leafless trees o’ershade,
And lonely Woodcocks haunt the watery glade—
He lifts the tube, and level with his eye,
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky.
Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath,
The clamorous Lapwings feel the leaden death:
Oft, as the mounting Larks their notes prepare,
They fall and leave their little lives in air.”
His Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard (a romantic version of a very realistic story), Temple of Fame, Imitations of Chaucer, translation of the Iliad (1713–1720)—characterised by Gibbon as having “every merit but that of likeness to its original”—an edition of Shakspere, The Dunciad (1728), translation of the Odyssey, are some of the works which attest his genius and industry. But it is with his Moral Essays—and in particular the Essay on Man (1732–1735), the most important of his productions—that we are especially concerned.
As is pretty well known, these Essays owe their conception, in great part, to his intimate friend St. John Bolingbroke. Although the author by birth and, perhaps, still more from a feeling of pride which might make him reluctant to abandon an unfashionable sect (such it was at that time), belonged nominally to the Old Church, the theology and metaphysics of the work display little of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. The pervading principles of the Essay on Man are natural theology or, as Warburton styles it, “Naturalism” (i.e., the putting aside human assertion for the study of the attributes of Deity through its visible manifestations) and Optimism.[145]